The Quare Women: A Story of the Kentucky Mountains - Paperback

by Lucy Furman (Author), Rebecca Gayle Howell (Foreword by)

When Katherine Pettit and May Stone arrived in the rural Appalachian mountains of eastern Kentucky to engage in social settlement work in the late 1800s, they were unmarried outsiders, living in pitched tents on the side of a hill, and perceived as odd, peculiar -- and "quare" (the local pronunciation of "queer"). Yet these strong, capable educators wanted to "learn all we can and teach all we can," and in doing so would persevere to establish the Hindman Settlement School in 1902. When Lucy

Author Biography

Lucy Furman (1870-1958) was a celebrated American novelist of the early twentieth century, and Hindman Settlement School's first director of grounds, gardens, and livestock. Her fiction offered a rare look at Kentucky mountain culture from within its agrarian economy, significantly influencing future generations of Appalachian writers. In her lifetime, she wrote five novels and a collection of stories; she also became an animal rights activist on the national stage and was instrumental in Kentucky's legislative ban of steel traps.

Rebecca Gayle Howell's most recent book is American Purgatory, which was selected by Don Share for Great Britain's 2016 Sexton Prize and named a must-read collection by Poetry London, The Millions, and the Courier-Journal. Her awards include fellowships from United States Artists, the Carson McCullers Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Howell serves as the poetry editor for Oxford American and is the James Still Writer-in-Residence at Hindman Settlement School.